Re: additional HTML+ FORM types

William M. Perry (wmperry@mango.ucs.indiana.edu)
Sun, 10 Oct 1993 07:53:29 -0500

In response to your message dated: Sat, 09 Oct 1993 20:17:44 PST
>We have checkboxes, radio buttons, and rudimentary fields. What other
>types would people like to see for FORMs? How about sliders
>(vertical, horizontal, knobs)? Selection lists? Should the user be
>able to queue clicks in an ISMAP area to go along with some other
>checkbox and field selections before being sent off as a single
>query?

These all sound great, but could we please stick to generalized
types like 'sliders' or 'pick lists', not 'knobs'. Remember - a lot
of people are going to want to use this on a dumb terminal.

It was extremely easy to put the current forms support into my
emacs browser - all the typechecking is finished. For things like
sliders and selection lists I imagine it would take twice as long.

I think extending the INT/FLOAT types to have a minimum and maximum
range would be a better idea than sliders. Browsers that have that
capacity could automatically display them as sliders or spinners or
whatever.

I hate to bring up a religious issue, but HTML is supposed to be
presentation-free, so things like <INPUT TYPE="int" MIN="10"
MAX="100"> would be more appropriate.

Am I way off base here? Forms are going to be an extremely
powerful part of the web, and all browsers should be able to access
them.

-Bill P.